Adam Kolawa

The primary mission of information technology is to improve business processes and increase profits. Companies are constantly rethinking and struggling with how to use IT to a competitive advantage, reduce IT operating and maintenance costs, and reduce the total cost of ownership… all while attempting to deliver increased value. Most of these problems can be traced to the same source: the struggle to make software work - without incurring unreasonable costs. Thus, it all seems to lead back to cost, which raises the question of why software development is so costly. Most people in the industry would agree that low IT productivity is the culprit here. But why are IT teams, with all their expertise and hard work, suffering from low productivity? The root cause of this low productivity can be traced to errors that result from mistakes made throughout the softwar... (more)

Automated Error Prevention for Linux

Most organizations that use Linux as a business operating system are developing their own applications for Linux - perhaps in response to the current scarcity of packaged applications available on Linux. With so much internal development for Linux, it is critical that the IT groups building your Linux-based applications have a means to efficiently produce reliable code. If they don't, you will jeopardize the very reliability and cost-effectiveness that most organizations are trying to achieve by turning to Linux. However, most development teams follow a development process that ... (more)

Cleaning Up XML

Garbage in, garbage out - it's an axiom that applies to many aspects of enterprise development, but none more so than building reliable and robust Web applications and integration projects with XML. Since its inception, XML has been seen as the cure-all for every problem related to Web application development. However, poorly written XML can either slow down an integration project, or worse, cause the integration project to collapse. It's important to understand some of the inefficiencies of XML, as well as how you can "clean up" and prevent the use of poorly written XML in deve... (more)

Java Application Security in the Corporate World

The vast majority of corporate developers truly believe that application security is not their concern, assuming that network and engineering groups will build their environment in a secure way. But what about application security? Are you ready for the code audit? Application Security Isn't Getting the Attention It Deserves When most people in the corporate world talk about "security," they mean the security of the network, operating system, and servers. Organizations that want to protect their systems against hacker attacks invest a lot of time, effort, and money ensuring that t... (more)

Reducing the 80/20 Rule and Increasing Developer Productivity

The 80/20 Rule is a well-known rule of thumb within the software development community that simply states that developers spend 80% of their time debugging applications and 20% writing new code. This ratio, which would seem to some outside the software industry the very embodiment of bad productivity, is unique to the software development community. No other industry measures work performed versus the amount of error fixing that needs to take place. Can you imagine what the production numbers would be for the Big Three automakers (GM, Ford, and DaimlerChrysler) if they spent 80% ... (more)